The physicist sighed at the feelings of guilt that coursed through him. Perhaps he was too hard on his nephew. Perhaps he had been for a long time. He thought of Carson MacPherson and how Chester had said his late partner had treated Gregor. Swain asked himself if he was blameworthy of the same insensitivity. Then he asked himself if the way he treated his nephew was born of jealousy. He had been around academics long enough to hear all the stories of older, established scientists who worked hard their whole lives, yet never achieved the big breakthrough. Then one of their students would stun the community with some discovery and they would crumble into bitterness. The world thought Swain had discovered room-temperature superconductors. He had been lauded in the press, lionized by his peers. Less than a dozen government officials, all sworn to secrecy, and Chester knew the real truth. Was this why he was so hard on the boy? Could he not stand the idea of being upstaged by youth once more?
“Chester, I have something to tell you,” Swain began.
Chester turned around in his chair. He hadn’t had a shower in days. His hair was oily and flew in twenty directions. His polo shirt was covered with so many food stains it could have belonged to a smorgasbord chef. “Yes, Uncle Jeff?”
Before the physicist could complete his thought, Boulter rushed into the Mission Control tent. The state trooper’s SWAT uniform was soaking wet and splattered with mud. In the past two hours the electrical storm had abated, but the rain had intensified; a half inch an hour pelted the canvas roofs of the tents. Jenkins meadow looked like a rice paddy in a monsoon.
“We getting signals?” Boulter demanded.
Angelis, who had been busy the past four hours trying to repair the computer system, shook his head. “The earthquake damaged those repeater relays. If any of them are alive and moving underground, there’s no way we’d know. But right now we’ve got worse problems. The U.S. Geological Survey has hydrostatic gauges on the Furnace River. The damn river’s running at twenty-five thousand cubic feet per second, almost ten thousand cfs above normal. If it continues to rain like this, the lower levels of the cave could be flooded within thirty-six hours. And we’re getting reports of damage at Hermes Reservoir. They’re attempting to shore it up, but it’s not looking good.”
“Son of a bitch!” Boulter shouted. He paced, rubbing his beard-stubbled jaw, then stopped and looked at Swain and Norton. “What’s that thing?”
“Watch,” Swain said. “Chester’s ready, am I right?”
Chester nodded. “I’d stand back if I were you, gentlemen, and put sunglasses on if you’ve got them,” he said. “Your retinas could get damaged by the lasers during entanglement.”
All three men took several strides backward, fishing in their pockets for sunglasses. Chester typed in a long string code on the computer keyboard, then struck Enter. At once a low-frequency tone competed with the sound of the rain thrashing the roof of the tent. An intense red saber of light shot out of the box at the head of the triangular formation and struck the prism. A second, midrange pitch sounded and a blue laser burst from the box on the right side of the triangular formation. A high, piercing note arose right on the heels of that, creating the musical discord of a child smashing his fists on a piano, and a searing yellow light zoomed out from the third box. It collided with the two other colored beams inside the prism.
There was a moment of searing brilliance that caused all four men to squint and turn. Then, from the bottom of the suspended prism, green light poured forth. The light cascaded downward and reflected off the white board on the floor below it. It rebounded rose, gathered volume, and then became a discernible shape.
“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Boulter muttered. “The fat little shit’s a genius.”
“I would not go that far,” Swain said. “But it’s a good step.”
“Good step?” the NASA mission commander cried, shaking his head in wonder. “It’s incredible.”
Hovering there above the white board, cast in shades of opaque green, was a three-dimensional holograph of Labyrinth Cave. At first glance, it looked like a school of a hundred jellyfish doing battle with a miserable assembly of octopuses and squid; the thousands of tentacles seemed to hang, arch, and coil off the scrum of geologic mollusks in an almost incomprehensible tangle.
Swain crouched to study it and soon saw structure within the morass: nine distinct, elongated, hump-shaped gatherings linked together by filigreed appendages sprouting from their bases. High on the sides of four of the humps were gaping holes, like hungry beaks searching for food: the main entrances to Labyrinth Cave. There were similar mouths at the bottom of the north end of each hump. From each of these mouths emerald liquids spilled into one common, slow-moving stream.
Chester snapped his fingers. “Why didn’t we think of it before?”
“What?” Angelis demanded.
Chester slapped his thigh and chuckled to himself.
“What is it?” Swain demanded.
“Can’t you see it, Uncle Jeff? It’s right there in front of your nose. Remember what Mrs. Burke told us? Caves are formed by water seeking its tortured way through soluble rock to base level, where it flows to a common drainage and eventually to the sea.”
“Okay?” Boulter said.
Chester gestured at the four openings high on the sides of the holographic representation of the cave. “We’ve been running the sensors only at the entrances humans could use.”
Then he pointed at the nine spots on the holograph where the emerald liquid poured into the single stream. “The point is that there are nine other ways into Labyrinth Cave, or actually nine ways out of it, all of them submerged beneath the Furnace River. We have to go to these outflows and lower the sensors into the water. Wherever the readings are strongest, we’ll find the stone.”
“Not bad, Chester,” Swain said. “B-plus.”
6:40 P.M.
KING’S CASTLE CAVERN
MUNK’S RIDGE
LABYRINTH CAVE
Tom knelt next to Cricket. She shivered violently despite the heat packs. He picked her up and held her to his chest. She opened her eyes and looked at him. Tom smiled. “You were unbelievably brave up there.”
“So tired, Daddy,” she mumbled.
“We all are,” he said. “But we’re real close to the supply cache now. Half hour, tops. You can eat and get into some dry clothes. C’mon, honey, we’ve got to get you dry. I know you can do it.”
Tom could tell that Cricket wanted nothing more than to sleep for hours and hours. But she nodded, and with his help got to her feet. Half an hour, he thought. Was he right? Would a rescue team be there at the cache? It was the only logical place.
“Be ready to run when we get to the cache,” he whispered.
Cricket came wide awake at that. “Okay,” she whispered back.
Tom turned and, to his astonishment, found Gregor already shouldering his pack. He looked weak, but far better than Tom thought possible given the circumstances. Gregor glanced his way and their eyes met. Tom saw in him no flicker of consideration for what Cricket had done. Indeed, he saw such callousness that he realized that Gregor regarded him and Cricket as nothing more than tools. Kelly saw them the same way. But Lyons. Despite his vow to kill them all if they got in the way of his retrieving the stone, there was something about the man, something that told Tom he was not as ruthless as the others. Right now, however, none of that mattered. They had to get to the cache site.
“Let’s go,” Tom said.
He set off at the head of the line once again, circumventing the aquamarine pool and the underground channel fed by the waterfall, then headed west into an easy-walking passage with a gently rising grade. The cave’s breath blowing at him was strong and soon its sound replaced the cascade.
It took only twenty minutes for Tom to lead them into a cavern of immense proportions. The wind ebbed and all was a fantastic silence save the crunch of their footsteps echoing off the ceiling somewhere in the darkness high overhead. King’s Castle was the second
of the three gigantic grottoes that made up the hollow interior of Munk’s Ridge. The underground mountain lay on their left.
Tom slowed as he approached the gigantic breakdown pile. He swung his headlamp all around like a beacon. Any rescue team NASA might have sent would have to come through the low passage that led over the peak of the underground crag. He glanced over his shoulder at Cricket and she began to wave her headlamp beam around as well.
“What the hell are you doing?” Kelly asked.
“Just, ah, just making sure the pile there’s stable,” Tom replied. “The earthquake could have weakened it.”
He threw his light higher up the side of the underground mountain. But his beam revealed only jumbles of rock and dun flowstone in the shape of castle turrets. No noise. No light. No sign of rescue. Nothing. Nothing but silence.
For a second, Tom was flooded with the same sort of marooned feeling that had overpowered him when he first received word that Whitney and Jeannie Yung had gone missing in Terror Hole Cave. Then he noticed the tears in Cricket’s eyes.
“We’re going to be all right,” he told her. “The cache is up here two or three hundred yards. Okay?”
“Okay,” Cricket said, her chin trembling.
They had taken no more than five steps when they heard it. High overhead and to their left. Way, way up the face of the underground mountain. The muffled grating of rock against rock. A silence. Then the grating again. Louder this time. Followed by the rhythmic cracking of stone upon stone.
The inmates heard it too. And the whole line of them halted, training their headlights up the north face of the breakdown pile.
“It ain’t another earthquake, is it?” Kelly asked, the concern plain on his face.
“Shut up,” Gregor ordered. He stepped forward, the veins at his temple twitching, his gun held loosely before him. Kelly pulled out his weapon as well and cocked it. Lyons put his index finger on the safety of the shotgun but did not ease it off.
For almost a minute there was just the fan of their lights against the shadows and the shallow, rapid sibilance of their breath. And then it came a third time. The clacking of rocks somewhere in the darkness, just beyond the range of their lights.
Gregor hissed, “That’s no aftershock. Someone’s digging up there!”
“Help!” Tom bellowed into the darkness. “We’re down here!”
Kelly struck Tom so hard at the nape of his neck that he buckled to his knees. Cricket spun, intending to scream up the slope, but Gregor threw his hand over her mouth and pressed the pistol barrel into her ear. “One peep and you’re over,” he growled.
Tom rolled over and looked up blearily at Lyons. “You said you’d make sure we were safe. Why don’t you help us, for God’s sake?”
Lyons looked up the slope, then at Gregor and Kelly, who were glaring at him, watching every line in the big man’s face. “I lied just to keep you helping us,” Lyons said. “Ain’t my job to help you. Now get up and get moving!”
Supply Cache 1 lay off the northwest corner of the main cavern in a sandy grotto about twenty feet across and ten feet high. Ten red rubberized cargo bags of the sort canoeists use on long trips were stacked against one wall of the grotto. Next to the waterproof bags lay a medical kit and a slim, blue plastic box.
“Where’s the food and the sleeping bags?” Kelly asked.
Tom said nothing.
“Tell us,” Lyons ordered.
“In the bags,” Tom replied, feeling defeated. Cricket slumped to the floor of the cave. He saw her take off her gloves and put her index finger into the sand.
“There’s no time to stop,” Gregor said. The physicist was jumpy, looking over his shoulder into the broad tunnel that led back toward the north flank of the underground mountain. “Everybody grab a bag and we go. They could be right behind us.”
Tom, meanwhile, was staring at the blue plastic box. He hesitated, keenly aware of the bruise rising at the nape of his neck. The box held a computer linked via repeater transmitters to the surface. If he could get a message out … But if they caught him … He glanced at Cricket, her head down, more depressed than he’d ever seen her, running her finger through the sand. Tom felt terrible anger rising inside him that these men had been able to break her like this. He had to take the risk. He knelt and undid the hasps on the box. There was a laptop computer encased in soft foam inside. He raised a long whip antenna, then flipped a switch and the screen glowed to life.
“What he’s up to?” Gregor demanded. Kelly rushed toward the computer and made as if to kick it. But Tom held out his hands to protect the box.
“We’re about to head into an area of the cave that’s almost impossible to navigate without help,” he said. “Even I get turned around in there. I’ve got to download the map into my navigation unit.”
Kelly stopped, studying him and the box. “Take it with you. We gotta go.”
Tom shook his head. “Doesn’t work that way. The central processor functions off repeating transmitters calibrated from this specific location. If I move the computer, everything will be thrown off. It will only take a minute to download the way points.”
“We don’t have a minute,” Gregor snarled.
“Without the coordinates, we’ll be heading in blind,” Tom insisted.
Lyons’s attention jumped from Tom to the passage that led to the underground mountain and back again. “Get your coordinates,” he said.
The computer screen sprang to life. Gregor got behind Tom as he called up the electronic map, then made a show of taking his transponder out of his pack and holding it toward the machine with one hand, while triggering a function key with the other. In the screen’s top right-hand corner a red light came on. A tiny fiber-optic camera built into the frame of the machine was now activated and recording.
“C’mon, c’mon, hurry up,” Kelly snapped.
“Thirty seconds,” Tom said, looking directly into the camera lens. “And I’ll have a fix on the confluence of the Forgotten and No Return Rivers. With a little luck we’ll be through the rinky-dink and there at midnight tomorrow.”
“He’s up to something,” Gregor said.
Tom struck another function key, the one that sent burst transmissions to the repeaters he and NASA engineers had installed throughout the cave. “Done,” he said, standing up. “Let’s go.”
“You sure you got it?” Lyons asked, giving Tom a probing look.
“Positive.”
Just then, far out in the main cavern, they heard a tremendous crashing.
Gregor pulled his pistol. Lyons spun with his shotgun.
“Go!” Kelly cried.
Tom stalled, wanting to hear the sound of running feet.
Kelly yanked Cricket up and held the belly belt transmitter under her nose. “Move or I’ll hit her with it.”
Tom took one last look at the dark passage that led back toward the underground mountain, then grabbed two of the rubberized supply bags and stumbled toward the far end of the grotto.
10:25 P.M.
KING’S CASTLE
CAVERN MUNK’S RIDGE
LABYRINTH CAVE
A steady drip of sweat rolled down between Whitney’s eyes and dangled off her nose. It was ghastly work trying to remove the final pieces of the fractured rock beneath the two boulders over her head without triggering a total collapse of the passage.
The tension had gotten so dizzying fifteen minutes ago that she swore she had heard Tom shout to her for help. His voice had seemed so real and so close that she’d begun to hyperventilate and then to pound at the last locked pieces that blocked the passage. She’d stopped and listened again, eager for his voice. But she’d heard nothing.
“How’s it going?” Finnerty asked. The marshal was in the crush up to his shoulders just behind her right boot.
“This one piece just won’t budge,” Whitney said. “Maybe Two-Elk’s right, we should turn back.”
“Weren’t you the one who gave us a lecture on positive thinking?�
�� Finnerty asked. He passed her his combat knife. “Use this as a lever.”
Part of her just wanted to lie there and let sleep come and whatever would come after that. But something inside—the memory of how Tom had seemed to call to her through the rock—caused her to take the heavy-bladed tool from Finnerty and jam it under the lower edge of the blockage and press down hard. Pebbles rang off her helmet. Grit and dust swirled around her.
She waited for the debris to settle, then tried to pry the rock toward her. No luck. She inserted the knife into the gap she’d created and worked at it a third time. The pebble shower became a torrent and she had to duck, holding her kerchief tight to her mouth. When the debris settled again, the stone blocking the passage remained.
“Dammit!” she cried, smacking the heel of her palm against the rock
It moved. Not much, but it had definitely slipped forward. Whitney braced her boots against the walls of the tunnel and rammed the heel of her palm against the rock again. It slid ahead two inches this time.
“What’s going on?” Finnerty asked.
“Give me a second,” Whitney said. She picked up a chunk of limestone the size of her fist and smashed it against the last piece of the fractured block of stone. It popped free and clattered away. Whitney felt a puff of air on her face.
“We’re almost there!” she cried. “I feel it. We’re—”
She stopped at the high-pitched whine of the two boulders grinding against each other. A fist-sized piece of rock was all that now supported them.
“Get out! Get out!” Whitney screamed. “It’s caving in!”
The last stone holding up the two boulders disintegrated under their weight. Sediment and rock avalanched into the tunnel and for a moment she thought she’d be stamped. But when the boulders were dislodged, they crashed forward, exploding away from her, clattering and booming into the darkness down the north slope of the underground mountain.
Labyrinth Page 20